Guild Wars 2

Why? It’s been 5 years. Is it really that difficult to make incremental upgrades to spirit weapon skills to make them at least somewhat usable and viable?

What about completely reworking them? They’ve remade other skills, why not spirit weapons given how Arena Net has shown no interest buffing them?

Apart from Shield, at no point while playing my Guardian for over than 1500 I’ve wanted to use any other spirit weapon skills.

Help me understand.

All that SW are in needs is to reduce CD for 25-30 instead of 1 minute, and a better A.I, or actually remove the A.I.

They said they are reworking them last patch, now this patch rolled and nothing changed.

5 years of traveler runes also

I don’t think they said they are reworking them in the next patch. They just said they are on the radar and they want to rework them. The tone of the post made it seem like something that they want to do but is not high priority.

No more A.I please… A.I strafing with their 1s delay attack is just terrible. They can reduce CD’s all they want, the A.I will still be there.

Until they rework spirit weapons to actually be interactive (make command skills more engaging), I could care less about having AI floating around doing occasional dps.

Hopefully they’ll be worked on in the next patch, along with the rest of the utilities the devs mentioned they wanted to work on.

Imagine if the spirit weapons were Glued onto the side of our waist. sHammer to our left, sSword to our right, sShield directly on our backs. Just this change would buff them.

• Retaliation would improve, actually hitting all 4 (including guard) yielding 1k+ damage per aoe attack, per player.
• Command skills would be more skillful in terms of usages considering you’d have to be very near the player to use them (unless Hammer can still lunge at a player then return back to the guardian.)
• A lot of power guards would want to use sShield over Smite Condition or even a Trap because they can move around with the bubble. it’ll be a utility swap per match but still a nice option to have.

I just think that would be a better idea than simply reducing cooldowns or improving damages on the niche spirit weapons…. That’s the route Anet always goes…

A complete rework of the skills would be awesome, so long as it hits next balance patch (unless Anet is really nice and gives it when ready). Though the weapons would be completely passable if they just acted like necro minions but I can understand why they don’t (shield and bow would be to hard to be permanent).

I remember seeing these pre launch and imagining how cool they’d be. But limited time summons with long CDs are just annoying.

The best you can presently do is try to rotate between sword and hammer, except that hammer’s knockback is generally a royal pain in the lion.

What they should do is allow spirit weapons to be slotted as an elite and in that slot be perma. Do that and players would use them.

Spirit Weapons? Those still exist?

I really like spirit weapons (concept) and i really hate spirit weapons, it’s a mixed bag, they are useful in a condi build, (23k dps with not everything optimized) with the zeal trait.

The animations are beautiful, but there is something lacking in my opinion:

So hoping devs will see this ill try to provide accurate feedback.

Considering spirit weapons are(besides traps) the only utility skills that do damage in a substantial way on guardians, they remind me of the famous spirit weapon artwork, a tank with magical minions that deals damage for him/her.

im not gonna comment on damage because that can be adjusted by Anet much better than me
All my opinions are on the traited version of the weapons wich reduces their CD by 20% because without it it’s even worse.

Sword:
+Pros: low cd, nice duration of 45 sec.
-Cons long cast time

Hammer:
+Pros: ok cd, amazing command skill,nice knockback,
-Cons: long cast time, (low active damage?)

Bow:
+Pros: nice command ability.
-Cons: long cast time, passive ability needs some love mby heals while autoack?,
long CD.

Shield:
+Pros: really nice command ability but situationals, maybe add protection too?
-Cons: long cast time, long

Something that would help is making them unkillable like they were some time ago.

Some sort of speedbuff/Teleport to target after using command ability? (the shield kinda does that by flying at enemies)

IMO there are two ways two improve spirit weapons.
1. The simple approach
Make them unkillable, reduce CD
Tweak passive effects to better match the current state of the game

2. The overhaul
Spiritweapons are now basically just an additional weaponskill on your utility bar.
The active skill is now a “weaponskill” with low cd.
Active stay the same.
The trait could be something like: As long as the Spiritweaponskill is on CD you get these effects:
Sword: Apply 1 additional stack of burning when appling burn
Hammer: Chance to daze target, target cannot be dazed twice within 1 second
Shield: Projectile destruction when under the effects of aegis.
Bow: Attacks heal if you have a condition on you.

Sword would give burn guardian an edge.
Hammer sweet cc.
Shield would give nice defenses against ranged enemies.
Bow would give good self sustain if you couldnt cleanse all conditions from you.

The clue on this GM trait is that the low cd if the weapons are basically the balancing of the trait.

This could even open up some E-Spec variety for other professions with other weapons.
It would be unique enough as a skill category and it would secure the controlabbility.

One of my issue with the dev team is that they tend to stick with flawed design to the very end. Spirit weapon used to be undamagable… Well as soon as they made them relevant hile undamagable the fond it necessary to make them damagable… The issue was (and is) clearly the design of the skill but still they stick to it.

It’s exactly like transform skills or conjure weapons, the skills just aren’t used or when a gimmick can be used with them, they become a problem for the game and they nerf them. And they end up not being used.

See, I recommended some changes be done to Spirit Weapons, but got told that my ideas where a powercreep, any changes to making something more useful to people is asking for a powercreep. All I want is some weapons that will stay out, until killed/exploded whatever, that actually perform well enough, so that they are seen as a viable skill and not just ignored/laughed at.

All summons should be permanent until killed, like minions are.

Anet’s not going to do it, because people are giant babies about fighting AI, but they should.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

All summons should be permanent until killed, like minions are.

Really got to disagree with this. Minions are just set up too differently (traits etc.).

Personally, I feel that Spirit Weapons could easily be reworked to work similar to Gyros. Not that those are the optimal solution but that’s more due to them being AIs as well. However, considering Engineers got Toolbelt skills, Spirit Weapons probably should be more of a mixture of Gyros and Spirits.

Example for a rework:

• Reduce the cooldowns (s. Gyros + Spirits)
• Remove the AA
• Rework the trait
• Spirit weapons are reworked to work like Gyros (pulse or on cast effect). Summoning them grants you a command skill which can be triggered until they expire.

Example for new the trait

• Summoning Spirit weapons grants you x (e.g. Boon). Spirit weapons blind and burn nearby foes when destroyed (synergy with Binding Jeapordy and Fiery Wrath)
• Summoning Spirit weapons blinds nearby foes. Spirit weapons create a Symbol when being destroyed (yeah… I’m aware of Symbolic Avenger… but it’s so boring).

Example for new utilities

• Sword of Justice – Pulses Vulnerability to nearby foes. Command it to whirl at a location (ground target), weakening foes it hits.
• Hammer of Wisdom – Summoning it recharges your Symbol skills (sorry Mace). Command it to charge to a location, damaging enemies in its path, executing a blast finisher at it’s destination and knocking down foes.
• Bow of Truth – Pulses a condition cleanse on yourself and nearby allies. Command it to barrage (ground target) to heal allies and reveal foes.
• Shield of the Avenger – Breaks stun and pulses Aegis on yourself (low frequency). Command it to cast a reflective dome at a location (ground target) in its reach (pathing).

Honestly spirit weapons don’t really need a full rework, especially not when ANet hasn’t even tried giving them some buffs. They’re bad for a lot of reasons, a lot of which include their cooldowns, active cooldowns, casting time, duration, and their damage values.

Xaylin.1860:

Hyper Cutter.9376:

All summons should be permanent until killed, like minions are.

Really got to disagree with this. Minions are just set up too differently (traits etc.)

That happened right before HoT, when the trait system was reworked.
Prior to that, both spirit weapons and turrets had multiple traits, now they only get 1. But minions have multiple traits, and got more support with the addition of “Rise”.

So, yes, they are set differently, but that’s because it was a deliberate decision on anet’s part to push minions as a core component of Necromancer, while spirit weapons were left to gather dust.

Like Fashion Mage said, no effect was made to improve spirit weapons. The old traits became baseline (increased duration and the active skill doesn’t destroy the weapon), but apart from that, not a single number has been tweaked for 4 years now. And now, we are talking about full reworks.

This is what happened with tomes all over again. No effort made to impove the skill, and so we declare it unsalvageable. Like we don’t all know that if tomes had like 30 sec cooldown (without the passive boons and stability), they would see heavy use.

The only reason I’m acceptive of a rework is because I hope they become more supportive, like Ranger’s spirits, offering some unique buffs to the party.

In fact, after trying them out again, I remembered one of the biggest issues that made them so bad. Their cooldowns only start once the weapons are killed or their duration runs out. This leaves an enormous downtime on them that pretty much leaves any spirit weapon build dead in the water for like 30~ seconds or so.

RabbitUp.8294:

That happened right before HoT, when the trait system was reworked.
Prior to that, both spirit weapons and turrets had multiple traits, now they only get 1. But minions have multiple traits, and got more support with the addition of “Rise”.

So, yes, they are set differently, but that’s because it was a deliberate decision on anet’s part to push minions as a core component of Necromancer, while spirit weapons were left to gather dust.

I wasn’t talking about having more than 1 trait or the HoT trait rework. I was talking about the available traits clearly proposing different playstyles or what they provide to the class. When you look at it that way, Gyros are the closest to Spirit weapons.

And of course, it’s a decision ANet made. What isn’t.

How can traits propose different playstyles when there’s only 1? It starts with that limitation.

It would be cool if spirit weapons augment guardians existing weapons in some way.

For example:

• Using the spirit bow augments your long bow attacks to heal. For example skill 5 performs the rain of arrows and rain of healing arrows. Also increases healing power.

• Using the spirit hammer gives extra cc to some of your hammer attacks. Increases power.

• Using spirit shield changes shield of judgment from a cone to a ricochet which grants aegis to allies and weakness to enemies. It also allows you to place shield of absorption anywhere in a radius instead. Increases toughness.

• Using spirit sword augments great sword attacks with burning. Increases condition damage.

Aza.2105:

It would be cool if spirit weapons augment guardians existing weapons in some way.

For example:

• Using the spirit bow augments your long bow attacks to heal. For example skill 5 performs the rain of arrows and rain of healing arrows. Also increases healing power.

• Using the spirit hammer gives extra cc to some of your hammer attacks. Increases power.

• Using spirit shield changes shield of judgment from a cone to a ricochet which grants aegis to allies and weakness to enemies. It also allows you to place shield of absorption anywhere in a radius instead. Increases toughness.

• Using spirit sword augments great sword attacks with burning. Increases condition damage.

Ill rather see them like gyros, low casting times, high uptime.

That wouldn’t even work, because longbow is a DH-only weapon, while Bow of Truth is a base guardian skill.

Then you have the issue of being forced to certain weapons to use spirit weapons.